Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  “The Shamrock was just tables and beer,” said MacLeod. “It was in a basement with no windows, and no light, just three beer taps and the football players who worked them.”

  One day between drugs and visits to Pat’s and the Shamrock, Steve called MacLeod into his room, where he pulled open a dresser drawer and revealed hundreds of pulp magazines stashed away in his bureau. It was all the stuff he had read when he was a kid. He pulled out the copy of Startling Mystery Stories with his story in it and told MacLeod that he planned to go to the next level. MacLeod, who also wanted to be a writer, was particularly fascinated by the other magazines, which he recognized as being at least a couple of decades old. Steve’s enthusiasm for writing and pop fiction would in turn fire George up, and they’d often head to the journalism office since neither one owned his own typewriter; Steve had left his at home.

  “We’d head over late at night and sit there and bang on these big manuals, and soon it became a routine,” said MacLeod. Sometimes, instead of working on his own stories, he’d watch Steve. “When he sat down at a typewriter, he would just go. He was so incredibly focused that if you hit him with a brick, he wouldn’t notice.”

  That same focus and confidence extended to Steve’s work in the classroom. Even back then, he believed in his work. Whenever a professor or student criticized his work for being too modern, he took it in stride.

  “This is me and this is who I am,” he’d respond. And if it bothered him, he’d write an essay or crank out an article for the school paper, the Maine Campus.

  Between Steve’s classwork, reading and writing, and social life, more than a few of his classmates wondered when the guy slept.

  And he still watched as many movies as he did when he was a kid. He had just entered his junior year in college when Night of the Living Dead came out, and one afternoon he went to see it. Kids filled most of the seats, and Steve would later say it was the first time in his life when he sat in a theater full of kids where they were so quiet it was as if they weren’t there. “They were simply stunned by the gore and violence,” he said. “It was the best argument for the rating system that I have ever seen. I don’t have anything against either of the Dead movies or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s not something you just hand to kids. You have to be old enough to take it, and these kids just weren’t prepared for it.”

  He vowed when he had kids, he’d do it differently. Even though he had cut his teeth on horror movies, the movies of ten years ago were totally different from Night of the Living Dead. He felt that the film left little to the imagination, and that it was better if you had to imagine some things on your own. He followed the same philosophy in his own writing.

  He was also starting to crystallize other ideas about what writing should and shouldn’t do for the reader. “Literature is supposed to be a sweaty, close-up thing,” he said. “I want it to reach out and grab you and pull you into a sweaty embrace so you can’t let go. I’ve always strived to hurt the reader but exhilarate him at the same time. I think a book should be something that’s really alive and really dangerous in a lot of ways.”

  He was becoming a keen study of human character. And he wasn’t afraid to ask people why they did certain things because he hoped he’d eventually be able to use it in his fiction.

  One day, he ran into a girl he’d known in high school, and she had a bruise under her eye. He asked her what happened, but she refused to talk about it. He pressed the matter, asking her to join him for some coffee.

  “She told me she’d been out with a guy, and he wanted to do some stuff that she didn’t want to do, and he punched her,” Steve said. He was fascinated and revolted at the same time, so he grilled her gently.

  “I can remember saying to her that it takes courage to go out with a guy,” he remembered. “Maybe you’re attracted to him, but basically you’re saying, ‘I’m going to get into your car, I’m going to go somewhere, and I’m going to trust you to bring me back in one piece.’ It takes courage, doesn’t it? And she said, ‘You’ll never know.’

  “I never forgot that. It became the basis for a number of different stories I’ve written.”

  After writing a few articles and essays for the Maine Campus, Steve decided to approach the editor, David Bright, about writing a weekly column. Bright gave him the go-ahead, and his first column appeared on February 20, 1969. Steve christened his column “The Garbage Truck” because, as he put it, “You never know what you’re going to find in a garbage truck.”

  From the beginning, Bright liked Steve’s writing, but he wasn’t overly fond of the nerve-racking style in which Steve cranked out his columns. An hour before the deadline with no column in sight, Steve would show up at the paper’s office. Bright, wringing his hands, would tell Steve how many column inches he needed to fill for that issue. Steve would then sit down at one of the big, hulking green typewriters in the newspaper office and bang out his copy, letter-perfect with no cross-outs, no corrections, no crumpled-up pieces of paper, and meet his deadline with moments to spare.

  His subject matter ran the gamut, and he clearly used the column to see how the population at large regarded his view of the world. In his column dated December 18, 1969, he wrote, “It just may be that there is a hole in our world, perhaps in the very fabric of our Universe, and Things cross back and forth. It may be that in some other world all of our ancient boogey men exist and walk and talk—and occasionally disappear into our own realm.”

  Indeed, in that same column he mentioned the story of a whole Vermont village called Jeremiah’s Lot that had seemingly vanished into thin air in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and he described a theory by Shirley Jackson, one of his favorite authors, that houses and buildings can be inherently evil. A few columns later, he offered profuse kudos to the university’s activity guild for scheduling a bumper crop of horror movies that semester. Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were all featured films, among others. He didn’t say whether the majority of students shared his glee at the slate of movies.

  It’s evident he didn’t much care about what other students and faculty thought of his column; he viewed it as a pebble in the shoe of people on campus, and his aim was to get them thinking, no matter how much they disagreed with his ideas.

  Another possibility is that he used it as a screening device so he could find out who his true friends were. That certainly seemed to be the case with his November 13 column, where he first admitted to liking the cops, then said that in contrast he didn’t much care for leftists and liberals. In the tinderbox of the sixties college campus, no matter where you were in the country at the time, this was akin to throwing a jug of kerosene on an already blazing fire.

  He then chastised fellow students who supported Huey Newton, a Black Panther who shot and killed a policeman in 1967.

  “Cops are the people who stand between you and chaos of an insane society,” he wrote. “In my book, the guy who goes around calling cops pigs is a pig himself, with a filthy mouth and a vapid mind.”

  He also took a surprising viewpoint toward sex and birth control. “Birth control demeans the act of sex,” he wrote. “It’s like jumping into your car, starting it up, and driving like hell in neutral. Birth control is a little gutless. It doesn’t seem right to laugh them away with a little round plastic case. Abortion is the only really moral way it can be done. If nothing else, it would force the person involved to come to a serious decision about birth control.”

  But he didn’t always write his column to stir up the bee’s nest or test out his supernatural views of the world. Occasionally, Steve would present a laundry list of his favorite songs and albums and movies. In late 1969, he devoted an entire column to naming what he thought were the best albums of the year—Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Abbey Road from the Beatles—and songs: “The Boxer” from Simon and Garfunkel, and surprisingly, “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies. He detested anything by Blood
, Sweat, and Tears or Glen Campbell.

  He also contributed short fiction to the college literary magazines, such as Onan and Moth. “The stories that he published in the student magazines had some power to them,” Rick Hautala remembered. “You couldn’t ignore them, but, at the same time there was a little voice that said, ‘Wow, these are really violent. Is this guy sick in the head? Why do the stories have to be so bloody and gory?’ ” Hautala added that Steve’s stories stood out so much from the others it was almost as if they were typed in a different typeface and color.

  Because of his “Garbage Truck” column, Steve was pretty well-known on campus, and even the top brass at the university were keeping track of him. President Winthrop Libby even spoke with Professor Ted Holmes about Steve’s prospects for making his living as a writer. “Ted was not especially complimentary on that point,” said Libby. “He said that while Steve certainly had a knack for storytelling, he wished that Steve would write more than horror stories.”

  Some of the students were after Steve to expand his platform from the paper to live performances. He played guitar and sang just as well as he played sports in high school, but he relished the chance to get onstage.

  An off-campus place called the Coffee House attracted the beatnik crowd. People would get onstage and read poetry—their own or someone else’s—and metaphysical fiction. Steve was invited to read one night, and he chose a story he had written about a guy who had eyes all over his hands, and the audience offered up polite applause. The next time he was asked back was for the Halloween performance, where he read a few more of his horror stories. When the audience started to laugh at certain parts, Steve was dismayed and thought something was wrong with his stories, but most likely the audience laughed from discomfort and anxiety and because the stories were so different from what the others read aloud.

  After that, Steve didn’t go back to the Coffee House and opted instead to attend the open mike at the Ram’s Horn, a coffeehouse on campus. But instead of reading stories, Steve brought his guitar and accompanied his singing. “Steve would always sing country-and-western songs about this terrible loser who never had any luck,” said Diane McPherson, a classmate who participated in one of Burt Hatlen’s poetry workshops with King. “I remember thinking at the time that Steve was singing about a version of himself that rang true.”

  Due to his weekly soapbox in the college paper, other students were starting to view Steve as not just a columnist but as a leader on campus.

  “He was a loose cannon as far as politics go,” said MacLeod. “He was a noisy radical opposed to Vietnam, but at the same time, he was an odd person: on one hand very private and yet public in a loud way.”

  “When the antiwar stuff came along, Steve just jumped in and was a leader,” said Rick Hautala. “Whenever we had a student strike, he never seemed to have any qualms about grabbing the microphone and expressing himself.”

  There was a military draft at the time, to which many college students were vehemently opposed even though they were protected from conscription, albeit temporarily, since undergraduates and graduate students automatically earned deferments. However, academic achievement was part of the deal: the Selective Service spread the word that they would not hesitate to draft a college student who was carrying less than a B average.

  When college deferments ended in 1969, the protests that had been happening on college campuses across the country since the midsixties immediately escalated. Poor physical condition or any untreatable disability such as myopia or flat feet would get a man classified as 4-F—prime condition was awarded a 1-A—and automatically exempt a candidate from service.

  Later on, around 1971, a lottery was instituted to make the draft fairer across the board, according to birthday. Birth dates were randomly pulled and assigned a number in order from 1 to 365. The lower the number, the greater the chances of getting drafted.

  While some students shied away from participating in campus protests in the hopes that if they kept their heads down and maintained a good grade point average, they wouldn’t be noticed and perhaps earmarked for the draft, others such as Steve didn’t care and didn’t hesitate when it came to riling up the others. He may already have had an idea that he was 4-F and exempt from the draft due to his poor eyesight, which may have been why he felt freer to be outrageous and fling himself out there.

  In addition to his column, he posed for a cover for the Maine Campus that appeared on the issue dated January 17, 1970, holding a double-barreled shotgun, with long, wild hair and a wild gleam in his eye that earned him a comparison by more than a few students to Charles Manson, with the caption Study, Dammit!!

  In his junior year, Steve was elected to the Student Senate with the largest vote ever in the history of the student elections. One of the responsibilities of the position was to regularly attend meetings of the student affairs committees. President Libby respected Steve’s drive and sense of fairness when it came to dealing with faculty and students and sympathized with some of the tensions that simmered between them, but he picked up on Steve’s true colors early on. “He was essentially a very gentle person who acted the part of a very wild man,” said Libby.

  It wasn’t a surprise that academics took a backseat to all of the other things that were happening on campus, and in the world, in the late sixties. Indeed, many students had trouble keeping their minds on their studies. And with all of his various activities, in school and outside of school, Steve didn’t necessarily strike his friends as a particularly stellar student. “We never really talked about it that much,” said MacLeod. “We all studied, but it was very much in the background. Everything was politics and poetry and recreational drugs, and rock and roll.”

  With students in larger cities and more well-known colleges all over the country closing down campuses and going on strike, Steve used his position as the head of the student/faculty coalition to make demands of the faculty and administration that would essentially reorganize the university. One night, he organized a march on the president’s house to make a slew of demands that various groups on campus had requested, ranging from more independent studies, bail options, and even free degrees for everybody with a minimum of academic work. He even entertained suggestions from the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the more radical student groups across the country, who wanted several issues admitted to the package Steve would present to Libby.

  On a cold, damp spring evening in 1969, Steve led the march across campus brandishing a torch and wearing a wet, ratty, full-length beaver coat followed by a ragtag group of protesters. Counterprotesters chanted slogans and threw eggs and rotten vegetables at students who were marching.

  In the end, Libby listened to the demands and promised to meet with Steve and other students to hammer out a compromise, but the protest soon became less important to Steve as he turned his attention to two things that felt much more pressing: his senior year, and Tabitha Spruce.

  Steve King and Tabitha Jane Spruce first met at Jim Bishop’s writing seminar, though they both also worked part-time in the Fogler Library. “I thought she was the best writer in that seminar, including myself, because she knew exactly what she was up to,” he said. “She understood syntax and the various building blocks of fiction and poetry in a way that the others didn’t. They wanted to go off into metaphysical frenzies about how they were freeing the voice in their soul and a lot of bullshit like that.”

  She had been aware of him since she arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of 1967. Before he started writing his column, he’d written a letter to the editor of the Maine Campus and the paper had printed it. She’d read it and thought, boy, this guy can write. “But at the same time, I was mad that he got a letter into the paper before I did,” she said.

  “He was that rare thing, a Big Man on Campus who was not an athlete,” said Tabby. “He really was literally the poorest college student I ever met in my life. He wore cutoff gum rubbers because he couldn’t afford shoes. It was just inc
redible that anybody was going to school under those circumstances, and even more incredible that he didn’t care.

  “Right from the beginning, I thought he was as good as any published writer I knew. I think it impressed him that I appreciated what he did. He also was hot for my boobs.”

  “Tabby looked like a waitress,” he concurred. “She came across, and still does, as a tough broad.”

  George MacLeod provides a little background: “When Steve and Tabby met, she was already involved with another student in the workshop, but he dumped her and she was alone when she met Steve. Some of us got the impression that Steve felt sorry for her, but they really clicked; it was two loners and two writers who really understood each other who hooked up.”

  Before long, they began to spend all of their free time together. Within a few months, she moved into a small apartment in Orono with him.

  Tabitha Jane Spruce was born on March 24, 1949, to Raymond George Spruce and Sarah Jane White in Old Town, Maine, just up the road from Orono. Tabby, as she would be called, was the third of eight children in a Catholic family and attended Catholic grammar school and John Bapst Memorial High School. Her father worked at the family’s general store, R. J. Spruce & Sons, on Main Road in Milford, a stone’s throw across the Penobscot River from Old Town. Tabby’s grandfather Joseph Spruce had purchased the store with his older brother sometime in the early 1900s.

  The Spruces were French-Canadian and had changed their name from Pinette in the late 1800s because French Canadians were an easy target for discrimination at the time. The Ku Klux Klan was then active in northern New England and recent immigrants from Quebec—one derogatory term that was often flung at them was Frog—were regularly refused work in the local mills.

  All the Spruce kids worked at the store. “I grew up listening to people talk over potbellied stoves,” Tabby said. “I used to cut chunks of chewing tobacco for old guys. My dad cut beef in the back room of the store. At one point my grandmother ran the post office from part of the store.”